This shot was taken about 20 years ago when I was experimenting with something or another. (You never think of yourself as important enough to date or document.) Like Trebor, when I first heard syncopated music I knew the attachment was for life. I was about 13 and caught several doses of it within a week or so and was hooked. I bought my first 45 rpm album, Tommy Dorsey's "Dixieland for Dancing," ran into a Theresa Brewer/Fire House Five+2 movie short feature that blew me away, and then, at the local record store, I heard a track on an RCA album featuring great trumpet players of Bunk Johnson's band playing "When the Saints ..."
I then spent $130 for a new clarinet and the next four years of my life proving I was not going to be a great musician. But lord I tried. Then the military came along for another four years and after that "life happened." But I amassed every hot record I could find, read everything out there, and joined the New Orleans Jazz Club.
In 1979, my father died and I had a talk with myself about working 16 hours a day doing a bunch of crap that I really didn't want to do, so I headed for the St Louis Ragtime Festival just to see what was what. Noticed no one was taking pictures so I junked my Brownie, bought a Canon AE-1, and got serious. A couple years later, the darkroom followed and I really got serious. The rest is a record of an amateur, part-time, hobbyist. And, when, like Bill Russell, all else failed...I'd point, shoot, hope. Sometimes, a magic happened. GCW